Who Was Alive

James K. Polk

President of the United States from 1845 to 1849

Born 2 November 1795 · died 15 June 1849, aged 53

Who was alive at the same time as James K. Polk?

  1. Immanuel Kant
  2. George Washington
  3. Thomas Jefferson
  4. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
  5. Ludwig van Beethoven
  6. Napoleon
  7. Lord Byron
  8. James K. Polk
  9. Alexander Pushkin
  10. Victor Hugo
  11. Hans Christian Andersen
  12. Edgar Allan Poe
  13. Abraham Lincoln
  14. Charles Darwin
  15. Charles Dickens
  16. Richard Wagner
  17. Otto von Bismarck
  18. Karl Marx
  19. Fyodor Dostoyevsky
  20. Louis Pasteur
  21. Leo Tolstoy
  22. Mark Twain
  23. Friedrich Nietzsche
  24. Thomas Edison
Drag across the timeline to see who was alive in any year and the age each person reached that year. Faded ends mark uncertain dates.

When James K. Polk was born, Napoleon was 26, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was 46, George Washington was 63, Immanuel Kant was 71 and Thomas Jefferson was 52.

When James K. Polk died, Karl Marx was 31, Abraham Lincoln was 40, Leo Tolstoy was 20, Charles Darwin was 40 and Victor Hugo was 47.

Born during James K. Polk’s lifetime: Karl Marx, Abraham Lincoln, Leo Tolstoy, Charles Darwin, Victor Hugo, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Friedrich Nietzsche and Thomas Edison.

Not quite contemporaries: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart died 4 years before James K. Polk was born, Vincent van Gogh was born 4 years after James K. Polk died, Sigmund Freud was born 7 years after James K. Polk died and Rabindranath Tagore was born 12 years after James K. Polk died.

Compare

All 288 contemporaries we track

  1. Karl Marx 1818 – 1883
  2. Abraham Lincoln 1809 – 1865
  3. Napoleon 1769 – 1821
  4. Leo Tolstoy 1828 – 1910
  5. Charles Darwin 1809 – 1882
  6. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 1749 – 1832
  7. George Washington 1732 – 1799
  8. Ludwig van Beethoven c. 1770 – 1827
  9. Victor Hugo 1802 – 1885
  10. Fyodor Dostoyevsky 1821 – 1881
  11. Friedrich Nietzsche 1844 – 1900
  12. Thomas Edison 1847 – 1931
  13. Immanuel Kant 1724 – 1804
  14. Mark Twain 1835 – 1910
  15. Charles Dickens 1812 – 1870
  16. Alexander Pushkin 1799 – 1837
  17. Hans Christian Andersen 1805 – 1875
  18. Thomas Jefferson 1743 – 1826
  19. Edgar Allan Poe 1809 – 1849
  20. Lord Byron 1788 – 1824
  21. Otto von Bismarck 1815 – 1898
  22. Louis Pasteur 1822 – 1895
  23. Richard Wagner 1813 – 1883
  24. Jane Austen 1775 – 1817
  25. Carl Friedrich Gauss 1777 – 1855
  26. Frédéric Chopin 1810 – 1849
  27. Friedrich Engels 1820 – 1895
  28. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel 1770 – 1831
  29. Sarah Bernhardt 1844 – 1923
  30. Alfred Nobel 1833 – 1896
  31. Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky 1840 – 1893
  32. Jules Verne 1828 – 1905
  33. John Adams 1735 – 1826
  34. Francisco Goya 1746 – 1828
  35. Friedrich Schiller 1759 – 1805
  36. Michael Faraday 1791 – 1867
  37. Giuseppe Verdi 1813 – 1901
  38. Charles Baudelaire 1821 – 1867
  39. Dmitri Mendeleev 1834 – 1907
  40. Katsushika Hokusai 1760 – 1849
  41. James Madison 1751 – 1836
  42. Honoré de Balzac 1799 – 1850
  43. Simón Bolívar 1783 – 1830
  44. Arthur Schopenhauer 1788 – 1860
  45. Victoria 1819 – 1901
  46. Alexandre Dumas 1802 – 1870
  47. Franz Schubert 1797 – 1828
  48. Søren Kierkegaard 1813 – 1855
  49. Henrik Ibsen 1828 – 1906
  50. Heinrich Heine 1797 – 1856
  51. John Quincy Adams 1767 – 1848
  52. Émile Zola 1840 – 1902
  53. Andrew Jackson 1767 – 1845
  54. James Clerk Maxwell 1831 – 1879
  55. William Blake 1757 – 1827
  56. Johannes Brahms 1833 – 1897
  57. Anatole France 1844 – 1924
  58. Alexander Graham Bell 1847 – 1922
  59. Octave Mirbeau 1848 – 1917
  60. James Watt 1736 – 1819
  61. Gustave Flaubert 1821 – 1880
  62. Ulysses S. Grant 1822 – 1885
  63. Joseph Haydn 1732 – 1809
  64. James Monroe 1758 – 1831
  65. Nikolai Gogol 1808–1809 – 1851–1852
  66. Lewis Carroll 1832 – 1898
  67. Wilhelm Röntgen 1845 – 1923
  68. Ralph Waldo Emerson 1803 – 1882
  69. Claude Monet 1840 – 1926
  70. Ivan Turgenev 1818 – 1883
  71. Catherine II of Russia 1729 – 1796
  72. John Stuart Mill 1806 – 1873
  73. Florence Nightingale 1820 – 1910
  74. Antonín Dvořák 1841 – 1904
  75. Walt Whitman 1819 – 1892
  76. James A. Garfield 1831 – 1881
  77. Emily Dickinson 1830 – 1886
  78. Martin Van Buren 1782 – 1862
  79. Grover Cleveland 1837 – 1908
  80. Andrew Johnson 1808 – 1875
  81. Henry David Thoreau 1817 – 1862
  82. Zachary Taylor 1784 – 1850
  83. James Buchanan 1791 – 1868
  84. John Keats 1795 – 1821
  85. John Tyler 1790 – 1862
  86. Percy Bysshe Shelley 1792 – 1822
  87. Mikhail Bakunin 1814 – 1876
  88. William McKinley 1843 – 1901
  89. Alexander von Humboldt 1769 – 1859
  90. William Wordsworth 1770 – 1850
  91. Millard Fillmore 1800 – 1874
  92. William Henry Harrison 1773 – 1841
  93. Walter Scott 1771 – 1832
  94. Franklin Pierce 1804 – 1869
  95. Rutherford B. Hayes 1822 – 1893
  96. Paul Cézanne 1839 – 1906
  97. Henryk Sienkiewicz 1846 – 1916
  98. Benjamin Disraeli 1804 – 1881
  99. Taras Shevchenko 1814 – 1861
  100. George Eliot 1819 – 1880
  101. Stendhal 1783 – 1842
  102. George Sand 1804 – 1876
  103. Benjamin Harrison 1833 – 1901
  104. Thomas Paine 1737 – 1809
  105. Hector Berlioz 1803 – 1869
  106. Charlotte Brontë 1816 – 1855
  107. James Prescott Joule 1818 – 1889
  108. Gregor Mendel 1822 – 1884
  109. Joseph Fourier 1768 – 1830
  110. Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres 1780 – 1867
  111. Mary Shelley 1797 – 1851
  112. Auguste Comte 1798 – 1857
  113. Ada Lovelace 1815 – 1852
  114. Paul Gauguin 1848 – 1903
  115. Chester A. Arthur 1829 – 1886
  116. Giuseppe Garibaldi 1807 – 1882
  117. Robert Schumann 1810 – 1856
  118. Emily Brontë 1818 – 1848
  119. Herman Melville 1819 – 1891
  120. Auguste Rodin 1840 – 1917
  121. Mary Wollstonecraft 1759 – 1797
  122. Adam Mickiewicz 1798 – 1855
  123. Napoleon III 1808 – 1873
  124. Mikhail Lermontov 1814 – 1841
  125. Pierre-Simon Laplace 1749 – 1827
  126. Franz Liszt 1811 – 1886
  127. Theodor Mommsen 1817 – 1903
  128. Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson 1832 – 1910
  129. Robert Koch 1843 – 1910
  130. Edmund Burke 1729 – 1797
  131. Robert Burns 1759 – 1796
  132. Felix Mendelssohn 1809 – 1847
  133. Frédéric Mistral 1830 – 1914
  134. William James 1842 – 1910
  135. Samuel Taylor Coleridge 1772 – 1834
  136. Giosuè Carducci 1835 – 1907
  137. Sully Prudhomme 1839 – 1907
  138. Eugène Delacroix 1798 – 1863
  139. André-Marie Ampère 1775 – 1836
  140. Herbert Spencer 1820 – 1903
  141. Thomas Carlyle 1795 – 1881
  142. Thomas Hardy 1840 – 1928
  143. Peter Kropotkin 1842 – 1921
  144. Alfred Tennyson 1809 – 1892
  145. Harriet Beecher Stowe 1811 – 1896
  146. Pius X 1835 – 1914
  147. Paul Verlaine 1844 – 1896
  148. August Strindberg 1849 – 1912
  149. Alessandro Volta 1745 – 1827
  150. Nathaniel Hawthorne 1804 – 1864

The 150 best known are listed.